Susan Oliver has made a career of helping entrepreneurs on the West Coast grow their businesses.
Now, she’s eager to apply that same passion in the desert Southwest, helping Tucson-area small business owners as the new director of the Small Business Development Center at Pima Community College.
Oliver was named director of the SBDC in mid-September and recently arrived in Tucson. She replaces longtime director Ellen Kirton, who died in March after heading the agency since 2012.
Oliver, 60, spent eight years as director of the Seattle University Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center until mid-2019, after working nine years as a data analytics product director for Russell Investments and two years as a bank product manager in Seattle.
But she spent much of last two years helping her family-run horse rescue nonprofit near San Diego cope with the pandemic, while continuing her private business consultancy.
Oliver — a financial services industry veteran who holds an MBA in finance and professional certifications in project management, agile business practices and coaching — also got involved in San Diego’s small-business scene and headed the local chapter of the consulting nonprofit SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives).
When she saw the opening at the college’s SBDC, Oliver said, she couldn’t resist the urge to return to Tucson, where she spent nearly three years working with a local financial-services software startup in the late 1990s.
“I think what I learned from the last, almost two years now that we’ve been in the midst of this pandemic is not just the importance of small business development, but the necessity of it,” Oliver said, citing an surge of small-business closures caused by COVID-19 challenges.
“I’m familiar with Tucson, it’s beautiful and I like the sunshine, and I started looking at the statistics and growth potential in Arizona and I said, ‘wow.’ ”
Standing out
Ian Roark, Oliver’s boss as PCC’s vice president of workforce development and strategic partnerships, said the college had attracted a large pool of candidates from across the nation.
Roark said that speaks to the quality of the center and the team Kirton had built and the growing lure of Tucson as a hub of entrepreneurship.
During the selection process, Roark said, the college was looking for a director not only with deep experience in business and entrepreneurship, but someone who also understood the role of the community college and how SBDCs can provide a new level of service to local small businesses, particularly historically underserved minority-owned businesses.
Oliver stood out for her experience and history of collaboration, he said.
“Really that history and ability to interact and leverage the power of those partnerships is something that our clientele really needs, and we found that in Sue,” Roark said.
Oliver noted that the SBDC falls under PCC’s workforce-development office, which includes strategic partnerships with local businesses.
“I think that represents a tremendous opportunity for finding ways that small business growth and development can also support job creation,” she said, noting that growing jobs is one of the measures of each SBDC’s success.
Roark noted that the SBDC will soon move along with the college’s workforce-development offices to new quarters in a renovated Science and Technology building at PCC’s Downtown Campus.
That will help the college gauge and meet the training needs of local small businesses, while the SBDC and a planned on-site business incubator will give PCC students opportunities to explore entrepreneurial opportunities, he said.
“The SBDC is really going to be key to serving small businesses, but it’s also going to be a shining example to our students, that they can be the business owners,” Roark said.
Helping small biz
The college’s SBDC, which also serves Santa Cruz County, is one of 10 centers in the Arizona SBDC Network, which also includes multiple satellite offices and six related Procurement Technical Assistance Centers to help businesses win government contracts.
The SBDCs are part of a national network of centers launched by the U.S. Small Business Administration in the late 1970s with a mission to help launch, grow and sustain small businesses with a combination of free one-on-one counseling, training and resource assistance.
Throughout Arizona, and in most other states, the SBDC is partnered with an educational institution. SBDCs are partially funded by the U.S. Small Business Administration, with the host institution providing matching funds.
The SBDC partnership with PCC started in 1999 and ended in 2009, due to budget cuts caused by deep cuts in state funding, but the college renewed its partnership with SBDC in 2016.
Last year, the SDBC and its two full-time business advisors served 315 companies, helping clients hire or retain 708 employees, boost sales by $33.4 million, raise $14.6 million in new capital and start 18 new businesses, according to PCC. The center’s fiscal 2021 budget of $413,000 included temporary federal COVID-19 relief funding.
While the sales increase, capital fundraising and business starts attributable to the SBDC were down last year due to the pandemic, after rising in 2019, the center more than doubled the number of workers hired and retained in 2020.
Big shoes to fill
Oliver said she realized early on she had some big shoes to fill after hearing about her late predecessor’s dedication for small business and collaborative efforts.
Kirton was the SBA’s 2018 Veteran Advocate of the Year for Arizona, and she was awarded the 2020 Community Service Champion Women of Influence Award.
“I can’t fill her shoes, but I definitely am going to be big on connecting with the community and the organizations,” she said. “What I heard about Ellen was that she was very passionate about small business, and that’s been my life for quite awhile now.”
Last year, the SBDC helped hundreds of local small businesses win federal Paycheck Protection Program loans to keep them going in the throes of the pandemic.
Oliver said helping small business owners cope with COVID-19 and adapt their business to survive the lingering pandemic remains a focus of the SBDC, noting that the agency had already shifted counseling to online and has been helping clients pivot to online sales, for example.
Client training is another challenge amid COVID-19, Oliver said, adding that she is looking at ways to make online sessions more effective and accessible with on-demand formats and mobile training programs.
Serving the underserved
Oliver said the SBDC will continue to focus on better serving “historically underserved” business owners such as minorities — a key goal of the SBA as well as PCC’s own Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategic plan, Roark noted.
“Certainly in the Tucson area and Santa Cruz (County) there will be a lot of opportunities to work with small businesses that tend to be the ones who are hardest hit when you look at things like COVID, so it’s how we can deliver more services, more effectively, for them?”
Though not bilingual, Oliver said she’s starting to learn Spanish to better serve her new clientele.
“My goal is to be able to lead a webinar in Spanish within a year, if not sooner,” she said.
Helping military veterans start or grow businesses will remain a key focus for the SBDC, said Oliver, whose SCORE team in San Diego was very involved in the SBA’s “Boots to Business” entrepreneurial program for vets.
“I mentored them as a SCORE mentor, and really found there is an intensity and focus and all the things that make a great entrepreneur,” she said.
Oliver says helping small-business owners stay resilient in the face of challenges like the pandemic is personal goal that has also been emphasized by the SBA.
“Staying happy and healthy and thriving in a pandemic is no small order,” said Oliver, who is a certified instructor in yoga and mindfulness. “I think for a lot of business owners I’ve worked with, they are asking themselves again, ‘Why am I doing this?’ ”
